VS Naipaul is a winner of the Nobel Prize for literature, and is considered one of the greatest British writers of his generation. So he must be a smart guy, right? Sure, sure.

Hates women, though. Yeah. Shame. In an interview this week, Naipaul said, 1) that no woman writer could be his literary equal; 2) that Jane Austen's "sentimental sense of the world" made her his inferior; 3) "I read a piece of writing and within a paragraph or two I know whether it is by a woman or not. I think [it is] unequal to me."

What else?

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"And inevitably for a woman, she is not a complete master of a house, so that comes over in her writing too," he said.

He added: "My publisher, who was so good as a taster and editor, when she became a writer, lo and behold, it was all this feminine tosh. I don't mean this in any unkind way."

VS Naipaul is like the Too Short of the literary world! But more patronizing.